The present invention relates to a process for producing palatable rapid-cooking pastas having good keeping quality with a fairly high moisture content.
The term "pastas" as used in this specification means starchy food preparations made from semolina, such as macaroni, spaghetti, noodles and ravioli.
Macaroni and spaghetti dried to a moisture content of 12.5% or less, for example, 12% are manufactured and sold in great quantities. Boiled macaroni and spaghetti are also manufactured for consumption both at restaurants and at home. Completely dried pastas have a very good keeping quality, but they require as long as 15 minutes to be boiled. On the other hand, already boiled pastas can be cooked in a very short period, but then they have a very poor keeping quality and find outlets in an extremely limited range of the commercial market.
Attempts have been made to provide boiled pastas with both good keeping quality and a rapid-cooking property by sterilizing them with a retort. This method is effective for reducing the cooking time, but the retorted product does not have an adequately long keeping quality and loses its body or becomes slack during extended storage.
Refrigerating or freezing raw pastas is effective in reducing the cooking time to less than 10 minutes. This is shorter than that required for cooking dried pastas but is not short enough to give the product credit for being called "rapid-cooking" pastas. Furthermore, this method requires a special refrigerator or freezer and is not simple to operate.
Therefore, it has long been desired to develop pastas that can be stored effectively for an extended period at room temperature without a special apparatus and which can be cooked rapidly within a period of only about 4 minutes and which yet are as palatable as completely dried pastas.